The indispensable Heather Cox Richardson reminds us that exactly one hundred years ago on this day, a substitute biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee was indicted for breaking a state law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools. A few months later he was found guilty, but he was vindicated by the judgment of history.
The story's more complicated, of course. If fundamentalism was dismissed by educated elites, efforts to prevent the teaching of evolution have never stopped. And fundamentalists regrouped outside the public eye, bursting back on the political scene fifty years later in attacks on secular American culture which may now be entering a whole new phase. Education is only one front, if a key one. Richardson takes the occasion to lay out just how deep-rooted the current attack on universities is (combating campus antisemitism is barely a pretext for plans announced long before October 2023).
That history reaches at least as far back as the 1740s, when European-American settlers in the western districts of the colonies complained that men in the eastern districts, who monopolized wealth and political power, were ignoring the needs of westerners. This opposition often took the form of a religious revolt as westerners turned against the carefully reasoned sermons of the deeply educated and politically powerful ministers in the East and followed preachers who claimed their lack of formal education enabled them to speak directly from God’s inspiration.Touching on post-Scopes fundamentalists' improbable alliances with business in resisting the New Deal and modern liberalism ("socialism!" "atheism!"), she mentions everything but the particular relatively new flavor of fundamentalism shared by Heritage Foundation and the vice president, that all the institutions of the land are to be stormed, their current inhabitants driven out and replaced. These people mean business and the theological fervor of their cultural revolution only makes it more terrifying. When they say "professors are the enemy," they mean Enemy - though their Golden Calf is the one that smells of sulfur.
